SAULIUS SPOTTED ME, and I him, the moment I stepped off the train. He ran to me, gripping my hand and hugging me at the same time. He looked just as he had a decade and a half ago—Roman nose, deeply tanned, the wiry body of a Tour de France rider. In the strength of his handshake, I knew that our friendship was still alive. We threw my collapsible bicycle into the backseat of his car and drove to his home.

The awkwardness I'd feared lasted only moments, then we were excitedly shooting questions back and forth, trying to catch up on each other's lives. He was 55 now, had survived stomach cancer, and was still cycling hard, having logged more than 125,000 miles. He and Palmira had toured Australia, Brazil, Iceland, and most of Western Europe. He was delighted to learn that I too was still cycling, and surprised to discover that I was a journalist, had a wife and two daughters, and had traveled extensively.

"Everything!" Saulius said happily, practically shouting. "Everything different now."

Even with the rise of computers and the Internet, even with 9/11, Afghanistan, and two Gulf wars, in the past two decades life for ordinary Americans has hardly changed at all, compared with life in Lithuania.

The solemn intensity Saulius had exhibited when I met him in Siberia had been transformed into the energy of hope. Pre-independence, he'd worked in a Russian construction firm as a poorly paid mechanical engineer. Post-independence, he went back to school, got an M.B.A., became a general contractor, and began building small, efficient custom homes in Kaunas. After five years he and Palmira had saved enough to leave their dismal Soviet block apartment and build their own house next to a forest on the outskirts of the city.

I couldn't help but wonder whether he'd kept Svabodny. Back in 1989, along with the bike, l'd given Saulius a crate of spare parts, so he could have kept it rolling indefinitely—but perhaps it didn't mean to him what it had meant to me.

Yet there it was, hanging in the garage, perfectly maintained.

"No bike like this in all Lithuania before independence," said Saulius, explaining that he used to ride Svabodny through Kaunas to show people what was happening beyond the Iron Curtain. After independence, Saulius rode right across the borders, touring through Finland and Germany and all the Baltic states. "I ride and ride. It's a special bike—your gift to me."

He reached for Svabodny, I assembled my folding Dahon bike, and we went for a ride. It felt natural to be on bikes together, cruising the streets of Kaunas.

That night, in a kitchen with bright windows, I met his wife, Palmira, a retired professor of textiles, and his daughter, Laima, a fledgling economist. Over after-dinner coffee, conversation inevitably fell to geopolitics.

"The only way to enslave a country," said Palmira in German, "is to cut off the head. Stalin understood this; that's why he deported the teachers, the engineers, the government officials, the officers, the successful farmers, the businessmen—all of us."

More than 20 million people died in the gulag. The post-Stalin decades were less violent, but the intellectual foot-binding continued. In 1986, Gorbachev began the process of liberalization that quickly gave 18 Soviet states their freedom. The new constitution of the Republic of Lithuania, a parliamentary democracy, was ratified by referendum in 1992.

"But that is all past," Palmira said, smiling at Laima, who will never be sent to Siberia. "Tomorrow you shall see Lithuania today."